Page 5 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

Caroline sat on the bench and thought about the maid’s face that morning. The way the girl’s composure had fractured. The way she had made herself small in the doorway, careful in the manner of someone faced with an authority’s displeasure, and how she had withdrawn from the room as though retreat itself were a practiced art.

She had seen that expression before. Worse, she had once been responsible for producing it.

She had told herself for years that she was nothing like her mother. That she was sharp, certainly, and possessed of very little inclination to disguise this fact from the comfort of others. But she was not cruel. That, she had always believed, was the defining distinction, the firm and reassuring line between them. And yet sitting there in a garden in Hertfordshire, with the quiet pressing in around her, she was no longer entirely certain that the distinction held the moral clarity she had once assigned to it.

It would have been easier, Caroline thought, to have been raised by an ordinary mother. One of those women spoken of in warm, gently approving tones, whose affection was presumed to be as steady as sunrise and just as unremarkable. She had long suspected such mothers were the invention of sentimental storytellers, a comforting fiction offered to those who preferred their family life neatly arranged and pleasantly dull. She was now beginning, with no small degree of reluctance, to suspect she might have been wrong. Even allowing for the inevitable imperfections of parenthood, most mothers were, she was quite certain, considerably less disastrous than her own had managed to be.

Caroline had never permitted herself the indulgence of self-pity on the subject. She had always considered it a thoroughly inefficient emotion, entirely lacking in practical application, and therefore not worth her time. And yet she found herself, in moments like this one, lingering unhelpfully on the question of what might have been. What she might have become if she had been raised by someone who looked at her not as an inconvenience or a reminder, but as a child worth noticing in her own right.

It was, she thought with some irritation, an entirely useless line of inquiry.

She thought, with no particular pleasure, of Netherfield last autumn. Of conversations she had steered for her own benefit, and of the general sense of satisfaction she had taken in being petty. At the time, she had considered herself merely honest in her assessments of the Bennets, a quality she had always assumed to be more virtue than vice, even when others lacked the good sense to appreciate it.

And yet she could not quite forget her transgressions when she had to sit across from Jane Bennet’s face at the dinner table every single morning for the past year.

Lately, she was finding herself afflicted with many opinions she had not invited and did not entirely trust.

The wood pigeons had, at last, fallen silent, as though even they had decided her thoughts required no further accompaniment.

Love, Caroline thought, looking at the still surface of the pond, was the one arena in which she had never managed to distinguish herself, and she had, for the sake of propriety and stubborn pride in equal measure, tried quite earnestly. She was not, after all, a woman accustomed to failing at things she properly set her mind to. Intelligence she possessed in abundance, competence she had in even greater supply; and she had been told often enough by those outside her household that she was not without a certain share of beauty. So she had approached affection as she did everything else, with application, determination, and a rather rigorous sense of strategy.

It had not worked. It had not worked with her mother, who had looked at a child and seen only an inconvenience, a poorly timed reminder, and a name she had never quite forgiven. It had not worked with her father, who had not so much failed to love her as never truly noticed she was there to be loved. It had not worked with Darcy, which she found she could think about now only with a peculiar blend of mortification and something that might have been grief if she had allowed herself the indulgence, though she preferred to think of it as nothing more than wounded pride in a misallocated direction. Because the truth, if she was being honest, was that she had not wanted Darcy himself so much as she had wanted the experience of being selected, as though she might finally, after all this time, be the sort of person someone chose without hesitation.

It had not worked with Gillsberry either, which in retrospect seemed almost comedic if it wasn’t so pitiful, given the man’s astonishing lack of suitability for anything requiring taste, sense, or basic discernment.

She pressed her lips together and regarded her hands, folded with neatness in her lap, as though order in posture might somehow restore order in thought.

Before you get much older, he had said to her. As though she would be reduced to some unfortunate specimen rather than a woman still standing in possession of both wit and income in her later years.

It occurred to her, not for the first time, that perhaps this was simply how things were meant to be. Some women, after all, were apparently made for love, and others were not, and she might have been foolishly optimistic in assuming she had ever been among the former. There was, she supposed, a certain logic to acceptance and a certain exhausted dignity in ceasing to pursue a goal that had never once shown the slightest inclination to be attained.

So this was the final, dirty hand that god had decided to deal her. Caroline Bingley was doomed to grow old and die a spinster. As lonely on the day she dies as on the day she was born.

She couldn’t say she was particularly surprised by this revelation. The sooner she accepted this, she knew, the sooner she could get on with the rest of her life.

The pond caught a sliver of light as the clouds shifted overhead, and somewhere in the distance a door closed with a soft, indifferent finality.

Caroline thought of the man on the balcony and then, with a sort of determined obstinacy, attempted to turn her mind elsewhere. It was, she had discovered over the past two days, a deeply inefficient strategy. He had taken up residence in her thoughts with an infuriating ease, as though four minutes of mortifying attention were ample justification for lingering far beyond any reasonable allowance.

She had not learned his name. She would not, in all likelihood, ever learn it. He remained, by every sensible measure, a stranger who had happened to occupy the same architectural space for a fleeting interval, scarcely longer than it took to properly finish a cup of tea. And yet her mind persisted in behaving as though he had done something far more consequential than simply exist nearby at an inconvenient moment.

She stood, smoothing her skirts with care, as though fabric and posture might collaborate in restoring order to thoughts that had rather inconveniently declined to remain orderly. There was, she reminded herself with firm clarity, an abundance of practical and respectable concerns awaiting her attention. She was Caroline Bingley. She had duties, a household, a social world, and absolutely no justification for lingering beside ponds indulging in entirely unproductive reflections about strangers on balconies.

Chapter 3

August 4th

There were, Caroline Bingley had long since concluded, a finite number of ways in which a dinner could be rendered disagreeable, and her brother's household had managed to discover most of them.

It was not that the food was poor. Cook had been with the family long enough to know better than that, and the pheasant this evening was, she admitted privately, very well done. Nor was it the company in any literal sense, for Charles was her brother and she had been fond of him after a fashion for the entirety of her life, and Jane was, by every reasonable measure, inoffensive. More than inoffensive. Perfectly, infuriatingly, exhaustingly pleasant. The kind of pleasant that made one feel vaguely guilty for not being equally pleasant in return, which was, as far as Caroline was concerned, not a matter then concerned her.

No, the true difficulty lay not in the menu, nor the conversation, nor even the arrangement of the table, though Caroline was increasingly convinced that the chairs were set at an angle designed to encourage reflection she did not care to undertake. The difficulty, rather, was the way Charles looked at his wife.

There was no other description for it that did not feel absurdly inadequate. He looked at her as though she were the only point of interest in a world otherwise politely tolerated. As though she were a paragraph of particularly elegant prose in a book otherwise filled with competent but unremarkable sentences. The room this evening contained, after all, a very respectable mantelpiece and three landscape paintings of considerable artistic ambition, and yet none of them appeared to hold his attention in quite the same devastating manner.

Jane, for her part, appeared to be entirely unaware of this state of affairs, which Caroline found, with growing irritation, to be precisely the sort of innocence that ought to be regulated by law. It was all very well to be kind, but there was something almost inconsiderate about failing to notice the effect one had on others simply by existing in such an effortless state of contentment.

Caroline cut a precise slice of pheasant, composed her expression into something suitably composed, and thought, not for the first time, that it was a particularly cruel injustice about being forced to witness other people's happiness at close quarters while one's own remained stubbornly elusive.